Metal sponges are identified as a new class of materials for their unique properties such as low density, gas permeability and thermal conductivity and have the potential to play a major role in adsorption, catalysis, fuel cells, membranes and sensors. Though significant progress has been made in making and manipulating high surface area metal oxide sponges, the same is not true for their metallic counterparts. The most versatile template based approach, used for the synthesis of porous metal oxides did not give the desired results with the metals and in particular, the noble metals such as Ag, Au, Pt and Pd which are industrially more valuable. For example, in an elegant approach, Mann and co-workers, synthesized metallic foams of silver and gold using the polysaccharide, dextran, as the sacrificial template [1]. However, the macroporous silver foam obtained has the surface area of less than 1 m2/g. More recently, Rao et al [2] have reported the synthesis of macroporous silver foam with the surface area around 1 m2/g by calcining the silver salt-surfactant, tritonX-100 composite at 550° C. Cellulose fibers [3] and, poly(ethyleneimine) hydrogel [4] have also been used as soft templates to prepare porous silver frameworks. Even, biologically formed porous skeleton was used as a template to obtain macroporous gold framework [5]. In all these cases, the template removal needs high temperature calcinations which sinter the metallic structure and thereby reduces the surface area drastically. The low temperature route, on the other hand uses colloidal crystals templates such as silica or latex spheres [6] which involves multi-step process in addition to the dissolution of templates in organic solvents or HF. Pattern-forming instabilities during selective dissolution of silver from Ag—Au alloys reported to give nanoporous gold with controlled multi-modal pore size distribution [7]. Herein, we report an instantaneous formation of high surface area noble metal sponges through a template free, one-step, inexpensive, method. By optimizing a very well known Oswald ripening process we were able to generate a three dimensional porous structure made up of nanowire networks. Since this process involves a simple, room temperature reduction of metal salts with sodium borohydride, it can be scalable to any amount.